Stardust Playhouse owner Kirsten Clapp reflects on two years of rogue theater.

Excerpted from a story that was published on Jan. 23, 2014

The first production of Stardust Playhouse, which opened October 2011, was David Lindsay-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole, a heavy play about deep grief. Next was Marijuana-logues, a stand-up comedy about weed that spoofs The Vagina Monologues. That one-two combo announced the theater’s intention of doing work that is risky and irreverent, tough and humane, edgy and entertaining. Two years and 17 productions later, they are closing their doors with the same ethic.

The theater’s last show was John Patrick Shanley’s Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, about a violent, wounded man who meets a depressed and traumatized woman in a dive bar. The play’s opening night nearly drew a full house. The next night, six people. Doing a play like that isn’t just living by one’s principles; it’s dying by one’s principles.

“The support has been there,” owner Kirsten Clapp said in the final weeks of her theater’s existence. “People have genuinely enjoyed themselves.”

Clapp was first exposed to theater when her mom, Stardust co-founder Judith Schwartz, brought her as a child to her own rehearsals for Monterey Peninsula College’s theater company. Clapp later studied theater at MPC where her appetite for challenging material found an audience; in MPC’s small studio theater she directed her first plays, Eric Bogosian’s Suburbiaand Neil LaBute’s Fat Pig. Koly McBride brought her in as guest director at Paper Wing where she directed Tracy Letts’ harrowing Bug. Then she and her mom found a humble space on North Fremont, next to Denny’s, pooled $12,000 savings, and launched Stardust.

In their search for meaningful art, money was elusive. They were always scraping by, getting props from home or Last Chance Mercantile, repainting everything. Most actors got maybe “a little something to say thank you.”

“My mom and I didn’t get paid,” Clapp says. “Our payment was that we paid the bills and got to keep making art.”

They had day jobs: as a systems analyst, in a soup kitchen, with the parks department, retail or waitressing. The money from each production went to the next production’s lights, programs, concessions, costumes, props, make-up and licensing fees. They charged less for tickets – $15 instead of the local standard $20-$30 – because they needed the competitive edge (besides, the seats didn’t have cushions).

Stardust was a small space, 845 square feet, so the plays felt close and immediate. Loyal patron Shane M. Dallman (who’s acted there too) has written of it: “You are there in the same room with the characters… like it or not.”

Clapp chose plays that worked for that kind of intimacy, pieces in which acting carried the work.

She says she would have been content to keep going, finding uncommon plays, rustling together a cast, paying for it with faith and luck. But her partner and mother, Judith Schwartz, walked away from their enterprise to focus on her job. That left Clapp alone to run the theater. Her friend McBride of Paper Wing had already offered to take over the space. [Paper Wing operated there until 2016, when they returned to just one venue in New Monterey.]

So after too many 70-hour work weeks and productions that ended with only $100 profit, Clapp decided to fold.

“This hasn’t been an easy process for me,” she says. “It’s really sad. I am very sad. I’m grateful for the actors and the patrons.”

But maybe a bittersweet coda is coming, like in their production Annie Baker’s Circle Mirror Transformation, about five people who attend a community acting workshop to learn about acting, but instead learn about each other. At the end, two of them meet a decade later and amiably reminisce about [the workshop]: Remember that time we did that one play? The real heavy one that everyone thought was going to bomb, but didn’t? Oh, yeah. And that one time when there was, like, six people in the audience? Oh, man. Whatever became of Stardust Playhouse? That place was really something.